The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

by Michele Young-Stone

  Buckley flushed the toilet. He thought, I’ll be getting out of here soon. Maybe I’ll go back to Galveston. Maybe I’ll go to New York with Clementine. You never know.

  Clementine spent Thanksgiving 1975 with Buckley and his “family” at the Holy Redeemer Church. She ate a few scraps of dark meat and some canned cranberry. After supper, she and Buckley sat in one of the back pews, listening to the reverend’s booming voice. He was trying to convince one of the parishioners to invest in some riverfront property. “A no-lose situation. Win! Win! You can’t let this opportunity pass you by. You’ll kick yourself.” He slugged his punch. “I’m not kidding you.”

  Clementine laughed. Turning to Buckley, she said, “He’s so full of shit.”

  The doors to the church stood open, the November air cool. It was dusk. Clementine looked stunning to Buckley in the waning light. Her hair was clean and pulled back in a ponytail. She had rubbed Vaseline on her lips and eyelids, and she glistened in the soft light.

  Buckley said, “He’s selling Amway products now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like aerosol cans and cleaners and empty bottles. He says he can make a million dollars. He’s got all these boxes of cleaning supplies in the shed. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you, there’s not going to be anybody left at Holy Redeemer if he keeps taking everybody’s money.”

  “The good Lord will provide, Buck,” she mocked.

  Buckley smiled. He loved Clementine. He worried about her.

  Chuck had grown tired of her blow jobs. She was no longer worth his dwindling stash, and Scott had not come back. To her own father she was dead (sometimes people don’t think what their words can do), and Clementine was beat from trying to live in this world. She was putting on a good show today and congratulated herself for the clean hair and plaid skirt, the white tube socks Buckley had loaned her, which she folded down like bobby socks, and the baby blue polyester blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry. Genuinely, she could say, “I look pretty.”

  When Buckley was in the bathroom, Clementine left the Holy Redeemer. She waved goodbye to Winter and Buckley’s stepfather, but they didn’t see. Church sucks. She hated thinking about God, this asshole who crucified his own son so that people like her, pathetic people, could have eternal life. What about this life? Face the facts: If you can’t live here and now with any level of enthusiasm, you might as well forget about some Nirvana afterlife. If you can’t get this one right, what makes you think you’ll do better in the next place? She was never getting to New York. She was never getting Scott back. She would never be able to live without her drugs. The world was too much.

  Crossing the parking lot, she passed the reverend’s unlocked pickup, spotted his hand-carved gun rack, the shotgun, the floor mat scattered with shells. Maybe the asshole upstairs was trying to tell her something. She’d borrow the gun. He’d get it back later. This was the same gun Abigail Pitank had worried would ruin her son.

  Clementine carried the gun, barrel in hand, on down the road toward Drop Out City. A few cars passed, the drivers doing double takes, but no one stopped. A trucker honked his horn and waved. A station wagon passed, two children pressing their noses to the back window. Walking down that road, she made a deal with this shit god that if someone stopped, if someone came after her and said, Don’t do it, she wouldn’t do it. She’d keep living. She’d know it was a sign that the world wasn’t as cruel as she suspected.

  When Buckley exited the bathroom, he expected to find Clementine beside the church ladies, eating pie. She wasn’t there. He thought she might’ve dozed off in one of the pews. No Clementine. “Have you seen Clementine?” he asked the reverend, who said, “Girls need space. Don’t smother her. Have some pie. Relax.” The reverend introduced Buckley to a circle of men. “This here’s my boy.” He put his arm around Buckley’s shoulder. “I was just telling Joey and Dan about that cleaner we’ve been using on the truck. It’s like magic, and you don’t ever run out. Isn’t that right, Buck?”

  Buckley didn’t answer.

  Winter handed the reverend a slice of pie on a Styrofoam plate.

  The reverend said, “You are one fine cook, Ms. Pitank.” Introducing her, he said, “This here’s my mother-in-law. Best one in the world.” To Buckley, he said, “Go on. Tell these gentlemen how that spray made the hubcaps shine. It’s safe to use in the kitchen too, so it’s an ideal gift for the wife.”

  “It’s great,” Buckley said. “I have to go.”

  The reverend said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I need to find Clementine.”

  “She’s probably in the ladies’ room. Buck, tell Mr. Jones about how those windows shined.”

  “They shined.”

  “See, I told you, and no elbow grease either. Isn’t that right?”

  Buckley didn’t answer. He trotted to the ladies’ room. Pushing the door open an inch, he called out Clementine’s name.

  Mrs. Jones exited the bathroom.

  “Is Clementine in there?”

  “There are no young women in the bathroom. Only old women.” She laughed.

  As Buckley left the church, the reverend calling after him to wait, the sun having set, Clementine Wistar climbed the clay hill to her lonely shack. Buckley drove to Barry’s Pool Palace where Chuck hung out, thinking he’d find Clementine there.

  Clementine sat on her sleeping bag, her Drop Out City shack now clean. Her clothes folded. The darkness in the room like a blanket warming her, she took off her shoe and fumbled, her toe on the trigger of John Whitehouse’s shotgun, the barrel just below her nose. Ironically, as Buckley drove his stepfather’s truck toward the old dirt hill, as Buckley parked and climbed the hill, hopeful that Clementine could come and stay with him in his grandmother’s house, could maybe move in with them and get a job, Clementine had a second thought. She thought maybe she didn’t want to die. Maybe I want to live. I’m only seventeen. The gun went off just the same. Buckley heard the shot, the sound of the gun like thunder smothering him.

  Before he reached the shack where light had seeped in during the warm Arkansas fall he’d spent with her, he knew that Clementine Wistar was dead. She was not recognizable when he found her, legs washed clean for church and Thanksgiving dinner. He recognized her legs and glanced at the folded clothes.

  When he carried her down the hill, blood soaking his shirt, he dropped her twice. He struggled to get her to the truck, saying again and again—as he’d done with his mother—“Don’t do this to me.” Struggling to put Clementine in the passenger’s seat, he dropped her one final time outside the truck, her limp arm knocking the door.

  As he slammed the door, her head, what was left of it, slumped onto the metal glove compartment.

  “Don’t die on me.” But he knew she was already dead.

  He drove twenty miles to the emergency room, repeating his mantra, “Don’t do this to me.” The emergency room nurse, earning time and a half—it being a holiday—remembered Clementine: the girl who tried to kill herself with Seconal. She’d come to the clinic in Mont Blanc. This time there was a boy with her, an innocent-looking boy, who was not crying. He was numb now, finally. He had achieved what Clementine had so desired. He sat with a clipboard, paperwork, all blood-soaked, a dead girl in his lap.

  Three years later in Farmville, Virginia, the nurse told Clementine’s story as Claire Burke’s stomach was pumped and she vomited. Claire Burke was saved from death, and a little girl, believing herself invisible and invincible, stood in the Farmville General Hospital corridor, overhearing the sad tale of one Clementine Wistar.

  Buckley stood in the hospital emergency room as Clementine Wistar was taken from him, lifted onto a gurney, and rolled away. Never seen again. The nurse said, “I’m sorry.” Buckley didn’t hear her.

  He drove home that Thanksgiving night to Winter and the reverend. The reverend was already asleep in his bed, while Winter, not looking at Buckley, not seeing the dried blood crisp on his collared
shirt, said, “Your little friend’s nice, but next time ask before you take the truck. We had to get a ride with the Willises. You know I don’t like them.”

  An Excerpt from

  THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS

  “It sounded like a gun exploding in my ear. I wanted to run, but I was paralyzed from the neck down. I wanted to scream, but my voice was gone. I remember thinking, Why, God? Why did you do this to me?

  Afterward, I stopped going to church. My wife is upset, but I told her, ‘Going to church isn’t going to help me, and it’s not going to help you either. The universe is random.’”

  Account by Gene Redberry,

  struck on a golf course in Miami,

  Florida.

  [19]

  Patty-Cake: A brief history, 1977–81

  In February 1977, Rowan Burke met Patricia Heathrow. Jimmy Carter was president and Becca was seven years old. In another two months, she’d turn eight. In August, she’d be struck by lightning.

  With barely a tap at the doorjamb, Patricia Heathrow bustled into Rowan’s cramped office in Venable Hall. She was brusque, reminding him on that February day of his wife, Mary, when they’d first met at UNC. She was beautiful, as Mary had been, as Mary still was, but this was a trait Rowan now rarely recognized in his wife.

  Sitting across from Rowan, Patricia dug into her briefcase, muttering to herself about the ridiculous drive, the traffic on I-85, how they ought to double her salary. She plucked a handful of folders from the case and centered them on his desk, on top of the stack of tests he needed to grade.

  Without introducing herself, she said, “Mr. Jones is interested in the formula on paper. Very interested, but we’ll need you to meet with the chemistry board.” She leaned back in the chair and, stretching her arms above her head, said, “Is there a good place to eat around here?”

  He’d spoken to this woman on the phone. They’d arranged to meet at two o’clock. It was now twelve-fifty. He said, “You’re Patricia.” Extending his hand across the desk, he said, “Rowan Burke. It’s a pleasure.”

  “Patty,” she said. “That’s not a contract.” She pointed to the stack of colored folders. “It’s a proposal. Something to consider and what we’ll expect in your presentation to the board.” Rising from the chair, she said, “I’m famished. Have you eaten?”

  He had in fact eaten in the cafeteria across from Venable, but he lied. This was important.

  He told her that they could walk, but she insisted on driving because of the cold. When they reached her car, she plucked a parking ticket from the windshield, then unlocked the Cadillac El Dorado and flung the blue ticket into the backseat, where it settled on a stack of multicolored folders—much like the stack left on his desk.

  On that first meeting, Rowan thought mostly of the fortune he could make if Atkins and Thames bought his additive, if they hired him as a consultant. He thought about the cars he would buy, the yacht, the vacations, the life that he deserved. He thought about Dean Thompson, that pompous bore; about Mark Cusemeo, Texas hick. Rowan’s family was a founding family. The Burkes built the school, the town, the history that was packaged and sold in Carolina blue sweatshirts and flags, and he was passed up for tenure. He was snubbed by the lot of them. His mother had shaken her head at his marriage, at his career choice, at his untenured position, at his disregard for and lack of wealth. “What do you expect?” she’d said. “You were given every opportunity. All that you could want, and look what you did with it!” His mother was dead now for two years, yet he could see her pointing that bony finger—her manicured nails. She’d been right on every count.

  At the red light Patty asked which way and Rowan told her to take a right. Since they were driving, he’d take her out to Lucia’s on Airport Road. It was a new restaurant in a new strip mall where Rowan still remembered the Matteo Farm: horses and cattle grazing. He remembered frozen days like today, riding his bicycle past the farm to school, the patches of grass crunching beneath his tires. Now the farm was a paved strip mall with a dry cleaner, a pet store, a doctor’s office, and Lucia’s, a mediocre Italian restaurant run by Germans, and here, in this dive where he felt certain the food would be undercooked or overcooked or just plain bad, he wouldn’t have to worry about running into Dean Thompson, Caleb Smook, Mark Cusemeo, or anyone else from the department who’d ask questions.

  Inside Lucia’s, after squinting at her plastic water glass with its scratched Coca-Cola logo and pushing it to the far edge of the table, Patty ordered a Greek salad, no olives, extra onion, dressing on the side, and a plate of spaghetti. “I want it al dente,” she said, “extra mushroom, light on the marinara.”

  “Mushroom?” the waiter asked.

  “Lots.”

  Sitting across from her, Rowan thought briefly of what it might be like to sleep with Patricia Heathrow. Patty. The waiter reached for her menu, and she said, “I’ll keep it.” A pimply-faced twenty-something, he rolled his eyes and tucked Rowan’s menu under his arm. Patty studied her menu. “Maybe I should have ordered garlic bread. Have you had their veal?”

  “It comes with it,” Rowan said.

  “Veal?”

  “No.” He stifled a laugh. “Garlic bread.”

  There were few women he met who didn’t cause sex to cross his mind. He didn’t like fat women (not that Patricia was fat); he never had, but even with the fat ones, he sometimes imagined what it would be like. Had Patty not been his ticket to Atkins and Thames, he might have thought more about a tryst, a one-nighter or a two-weeker, but he would not risk this opportunity.

  She drummed her red nails on the table. “I like Chapel Hill. I don’t like this song.” The jukebox played Kiss’s “I want to rock and roll all night and party everyday.”

  Rowan laughed. “My daughter does.”

  “How old?”

  “Seven and a half.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. How old are you?”

  “Guess.” He twirled the saltshaker in a circle beneath his pointer finger.

  “Forty-five.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Thirty?”

  “Close. Thirty-two.”

  Patty told him that she was twenty-three, that she’d graduated top of her class from Vanderbilt. She was a goal setter. A go-getter. A success. She planned to retire by forty. Rowan sipped his Pepsi and decided he had no sexual interest in this woman. She tried too hard. She talked too much about herself. She was too determined and too arrogant. She dug back into her briefcase and retrieved a compact. “I’m fucking exhausted,” she said, pressing at the skin beneath her eyes. “The price we pay for success.”

  Smiling across the table at her, at her sheer arrogance, at the price he had to pay if he wanted a contract with Atkins and Thames, Rowan thought, You are a baby. You’re twenty-three. You don’t know anything. He couldn’t know then that she was just as determined in her romantic endeavors as she was in her corporate pursuits. He couldn’t know then that she would follow him to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in another four years to meet his wife and daughter.

  At lunch during their first meeting, only one decision was made: they would never eat at Lucia’s again. Patty poked at a mushroom with her fork. She twirled a knot of fat white noodles onto the tines and then dropped the fork, pushing the half-eaten plate of pasta to where the dirty water glass had been. “It’s like Franco-American spaghetti.”

  “You liked the garlic bread.”

  “I was starving.”

  He picked up the marinara-blotted check. “So when exactly will I present the additive to the board?”

  She shrugged and said, “Things are still up in the air. Read the proposal. That’s why I brought it. That’s why Dottie Jackson typed it up and put it in the pretty colored folders.” She drummed her nails again.

  After their mediocre lunch, Patricia Heathrow drove Rowan back to Venable Hall. In the car, he stewed. He didn’t like anyone condescending to him; he didn’t want to work with this woman, b
ut he said, “I’m sorry lunch wasn’t so good.”

  “No, it wasn’t so good.” She pulled up to the curb. “Call me after you read the proposal. I’m at the Carolina Inn. The number’s in the red folder.”

  Walking down the cobblestone path to the side door leading upstairs to his closet of an office, Rowan felt disappointed. For the first time since he’d spoken with Dr. Glover at Atkins and Thames six months earlier, he thought, This isn’t going to work. That woman is a bitch. He pulled his wool coat tighter across his chest, stuffed one gloved hand into his pocket, and thought, They aren’t going to give a shit about my additive. There won’t be a patent. It won’t work. He turned and waved goodbye to Patricia Heathrow, who hadn’t driven away, who appeared to be rifling through her oversized briefcase in her overpriced American car. She didn’t wave back. He pushed the side door open and trudged up the back steps. There won’t be a contract. There won’t be anything. He had a feeling. He had a department meeting at four-thirty. He sat at his desk and picked up a few of the “pretty” colored folders. He never again wanted to grade another freshman chemistry exam or attend another faculty meeting. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a palm-sized mirror—checking his own eyes for wrinkles. Who did that woman think she was? She planned to retire by age forty? He had eight more years until he’d turn forty, and he planned to retire by then too. He pushed the desk drawer shut, tucked the pretty colored folders under his arm, and carried them home. He didn’t have time for department meetings. Maybe he was sick.

  Two days later, Rowan met Patricia at the bar of the Carolina Inn on Franklin Street to discuss his upcoming presentation to the board. He phoned her that morning, and she said things were no longer so “up in the air.” She said, “This is such a done deal, Rowan. It’s entirely win-win.”

  They met at a back table closest to the veranda. Rowan ordered a martini and said, “Did you know the university actually owns this inn? My grandfather went to school with the man who built it.” He looked around admiringly, proud of his heritage.